An American writer was, in the early nineteenth century, an evolving concept, and the literature produced in that period reflects both attraction and resistance to the ideas of national identity and individual voice. This course will read Emerson, Thoreau and Melville as thinking variously about what it means to be an American self who writes. We will contextualize their writing with the politics, philosophy, and technologies of the period, and we will also ask how their texts speak to more contemporary concerns of selfhood, nation, and expression.